10.3.1 Support and advice

10.3.1 Support and advice

Education settings had to adapt quickly to school closures. The Department provided them with an extensive range of supports

On 12 March 2020, the Taoiseach announced the closure of schools, early learning and care (ELC) settings, and further and higher education settings for an initial period of three weeks. As it transpired, due to continuing public health concerns, schools ultimately remained closed for in-person learning for the remainder of the 2019/20 school year. Schools had to adapt quickly to the new reality, and the entire country entered into a phase of remote learning and home-schooling.

The Irish school system was designed for in-person delivery of learning. While innovative initiatives, such as the digital e-Hub Pilot Project156, have paved the way for future advances in online curriculum delivery, the information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure in Ireland had been designed as one of a number of complementary methods to support the mediation of the curriculum in schools. Similarly, ICT had been viewed as one of a number of tools that children and young people could use to support their learning. It had never been intended that ICT would be used to provide remote teaching and learning for all pupils and students. This meant that schools, as well as pupils, students and parents, faced considerable challenges to maintain teaching and learning.

During the period of school closures, the Department provided an extensive range of guidance documentation and additional supports to schools. The Inspectorate had a central role in developing the support documentation that was sent to schools. Supports provided by the Department included €10 million in top-up funding to support the purchase of technology and devices for disadvantaged pupils and students, the early payment of Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools (DEIS) grants to support children and young people at risk of educational disadvantage, and a significant expansion of the Summer Provision 2020 programme for children with special needs and students in DEIS schools. The Professional Development Service for Teachers (PDST) also provided extensive distance learning supports for schools.157

The Inspectorate engaged in an extensive programme of support, advice and data gathering

As an Inspectorate, we had to adapt quickly to provide contextualised support and advice to schools during this period. Initially, this involved individual inspectors contacting principals in primary schools, post-primary schools and Youthreach centres to engage in discussion regarding how their settings were providing for children and young people. As well as offering support and advice, inspectors availed of the opportunity to gather information on how schools and centres were continuing to engage with their pupils and students and supporting continuity in their learning.

Between 3 April and 30 June 2020, inspectors engaged with school principals and centre coordinators through a total of 2,873 support phone calls (Table 10.1).

Table 10.1: Number of support phone calls with schools and Youthreach centres during the initial period of school closures, March-June 2020

	Primary schools /special schools	Post-primary schools	Youthreach centres	Total
Phase 1 (3 April – 1 May)	810	534	42	1,386
Phase 2 (4 May – 31 May)	775	137	36	948
Phase 3 (1 June – 30 June)	535	0	4	539
Total	2,120	671	82	2,873

Source: Inspectorate, Department of Education

The next section looks at some of the main findings from these interactions with principals and centre coordinators.

156 Further details on the e-Hub Pilot Project are available in Chapter 9 of this report. 157 These resources are available at: https://www.pdst.ie/DistanceLearning